Handjet
In autumn 2018, I was lucky to teach type design to the talented graphic design students at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. Their first exercise was to build a simple element-based font tailored to work well with [handjet printers](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=handjet+printer&ia=images). Most of them had their first font with basic English and Czech alphabets done by the end of the day! The handjet’s 32-pixel vertical matrix defined the constraints. The only contour to draw was the shape of the element; the rest was “only” a matter of placing the elements on the grid to form letters. When I realized the task could be taken even further, I set out to design my own font. Not leaving the house that weekend I ended up with a pan-European Latin. A couple of days later I had Greek and Cyrillic too. And once I started interpolating the element shapes, it got out of control completely. Currently, the Handjet system contains 23 elemental shapes. Smooth transitions between them create various effects: a triangle appears out of thin air and expands into a square, the square rotates to create a lozenge, a circle smoothly turns into an oval, a clover becomes a rotating star or a heart, etc. The size of elements can be changed, producing different weights, and clusters of 2x2 smaller elements can replace the primary, single element. All work within a single variable font, allowing users to produce their custom variations and animations easily. In 2019, Google sponsored the extension and open-sourcing of Handjet. All variations and element shapes have been thoroughly revisited and extended. With consultants Borna Izadpanah, Khajag Apelian, and Meir Sadan, I have also added support for Arabic, Armenian, and Hebrew, respectively. Selected symbols representing wildlife and domestic animals were added, as were seasonal symbols and patterns. In 2023, Ha-neul Park and Lee-su Yoo added support for the Korean language by updating Handjet with 11470 glyphs of the Hangul script. — David Březina, November 2023 P.S. If you want to do this exercise with your students, have a look at this [Glyphs tutorial](https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials/pixelfont). P.P.S. To be perfectly clear, I went way overboard of what Handjets’ grids permits. Hence, only some of the fonts are actually good-looking when used with the printers. *WARNING: We have found that InDesign 2023 (18+) and Illustrator 2023 (27+) have issues displaying Handjet. You can solve this issue by either upgrading to the latest 2024 versions (19.2 and 28.3 respectively) or by downgrading to older versions. The font may show unwanted visual artifacts in small sizes in Safari/Webkit due to the specifics of the default rendering setup. Change the default anti-aliasing setting in your CSS to eliminate them.*
Published by Rosetta
- Classification
- script
- Variable font
- Yes